Persona Alfred
by Courtney JoAnne
Summary: Everyone who knows Canada knows that he is bassicly invisible. What not everyone knows is that there is a reason, a well kept secret that Mathew and three others have kept hidden very well for a very long time. alice in wonderland refs
1. The Beginning

A/N:  
This is only the teaser per say, setting things up for what really happens. The actual meat of the story will come in the next installment, I promise.  
238 words

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" Alfred, you are a big boy, so I'm going to trust you can stay home alone while I run up to the store real quick."

"Yah!" the young boy jumped up and down, clapping his hands. Arthur had never trusted him to stay home alone before this, and his mind raced with the trouble he could make with the older man out of the way even for a few minutes.

"You know all the same rules apply, no touched the knives, no messing with the stove, don't go into my study, and don't go into the basement…"

"Uh-huh…" the little nation nodded, though he had stopped listening when Arthur said the word 'rules', and his mind went back to the possibilities that were now open. What the older nation had said last caught his attention again though. Grinning happily he nodded, running foreword and hugging his father figure.

"Of course! I won't do anything, promise!" The blonde boy smiled up at him, his blue eyes sparkling happily. Arthur sighed, having a hard time believing that. He was in need of something for an urgent spell though, and he did not need a little country running around and touching everything while out.

" Okay Alfie, be good. I'll be back in a bit." And with a brief hug, Arthur left the young boy alone in the house. What harm could he do right?


	2. How it Happened

A/N:  
This is where things start to happen. I'm sorry if it is on the longer side, I promise that the chapters to come will be a more appropriate length.  
And also thank you for all of your love, with your favorites and alerts.  
The more you review, the quicker I will want to update for you guys too. I love Constructive Crit!  
Now about the story. It is based loosely off Alice and her Adventure's through the looking Glass.  
And there IS a lot of foreshadowing.  
And one last t hing, there is a lot of lines pulled from THIS video  
.com/watch?v=d7PdhBpaBiQ  
And there will be more extracts from that song to come. XD  
Word Count: 1,645

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The minute Arthur was gone, Alfred began getting ready for his adventure. That was fairly simple, as all he needed to be ready was his favorite red blanket, which he tied around his neck. With that he was off to the basement, feeling as fearless as any make-believe hero in his bedtime stories.

Now Alfred was never allowed in the basement without Arthur. It had something to do with all the old books and the chalk drawings he sometimes had on the floor and the candles and glass items and all that stuff. In truth though, he didn't like it when he came down with the other. Arthur always ended up doing and saying weird things, and he wasn't allowed to touch anything. Really, that might have been what he hated most.

Now he was in the basement and he felt a surge of power through his tiny body. He could look and hold anything he wanted now. He could explore the pictures in his book and look at the weird cards and…

His blanket caught on something and he looked back. His blanket had caught on an old dusty box, one that he vaguely remembered Arthur saying that he was going to put away into the attic. His little eyebrows furrowed and he pulled the box out into the dim light, brushing the top off with his already dirty hands. Opening it, his eyes widened, filling with wonder. He had never seen such a box full of wonder.

He began to automatically sort through the things in the box, pulling out one item at a time and looking over it carefully before setting each item gently aside. The first thing was a book that when he opened, was filled with many sweet smelling leaves, and bags of different powders. Each thing had a caption that was written in Arthur's distinctly pointy handwriting. Alfred smiled and set the book aside, being careful of the already cracked spine.

The next thing he took out was what looked like a glass bulb. Inside something burned brightly, and soon he heard an obnoxious tinkling sound. If you could call it that. It was more like screaming. Alfred flinched at the high pitched noise and almost dropped the sphere, though he caught it before it slipped from his fingers and immediately shoved it into a dark corner back in the box.

The last thing out of the many things left in the box he pulled out was a hand mirror. It was heavy for how it looked, and the metal it was made of was rusted over with black. The delicate little roses and flowers that had been molded and adorned the sides of it and wrapped around the handles were probably the saddest part, making the whole mirror look dead and useless. Alfred could feel something different about the mirror though, especially when the small bell that hung at the bottom tinkled happily. Pulling his red blanket around him, he began using the edge of that to clean it of the rust.

First the child cleaned the front, rubbing the little flowers until they shined a beautiful silver color. Then the rims, until he could make out faint outlines of words at the top of the mirror. He rubbed until the engraving was legible. There were four simple words, and it took him a few moments to sound out the letters.

_Shout._

_Laugh._

_Cry._

_Hear._

"How interesting." He sad aloud with a smile, and continued to shine it, not taking a terrible amount of time until at the bottom , bellow the glass and above the handle with the bell, he found more words. He began to clean away the rust once more, taking more time with the words as before. As it was a full sentence, it took a little more time for the boy to piece together what this means.

_The brilliant sound of a bell from nowhere._

The boy laughed a little bit, looking down at the bell. "Not from nowhere, from here. I wonder why it says that if it has a bell attached to it." He flicked the bell and it rang like a handbell and tinkled like broken glass at the same time. It wasn't as pretty, Alfred concluded, as when he let it ring on its own. He did notice however, that after the weird sound that the glass part of the mirror began to look funny. It was probably just the he could now see how badly the glass needed to be polished now that he was polishing the metal. He smiled and turned the mirror over to polish the back though.

The back was a lot different than the front, the rust gathering more thickly around the edges and thinning out towards the middle. So that was where he started. Words began to appear once more and he grew eager, not having thought there would be more. Soon another broken sentence appeared on the dully shining surface.

_It's like the rabbit which laughs busily and consults his watch constantly while running._

It was a strange sentence. More than the bit about the bell he thought. He began to rub it clean more, towards the top. He thought maybe there was a part of the sentence he hadn't cleaned off yet. And he did find more words, though they didn't seem to connect at all.

_It's like the girl who fell into a hole running after the rabbit in the dream._

Alfred was losing interest in his sloppy cleaning of the looking glass by now, and sighed, not wanting to think about what all this meant. It was too hard to understand. Running the now blackened edge of his blanket over the bottom edge of the back, he tried to feel if there were any more words that he had missed. He felt none through the rust so he flipped it back over to look at his amateurish handy-work. The glass was so pretty, why did England want to hide it away in the attic? He smiled; he would have to beg Arthur to let him keep it. That would be the only way to fix this problem.

Alfred began to set the hand mirror aside when he once more noticed the watery texture of the glass. Looking into it, the shimmering seemed to disappear though, and he was a bit perplexed. He was distracted shortly afterwards by his own reflection though. His reflection looked a bit different than normal.

Had his hair always been wavy? And when had his eyes darkened? He shrugged it off as a play of the light though and smiled. He was cute.

" You know, you are cute." The little boy laughed conceitedly pointing at the mirror, his reflection doing the same. " I think we would get along, I bet you would be a lot of fun to play with, and we would both have Dad wrapped around out fingers." He giggled some more.

" You know, it would be really awesome if you were real…" he smiled sadly " I don't have any friends my age. But I suppose you are stuck in that other world on that other side of the glass." He sighed, his lonely little boy heart fully believing what Arthur had told him about there being parallel worlds on the other side of the glass.

"I wonder what it is like on that side of the mirror…" he moved to spread his hand against the glass, though when he touched it, it began to shimmer again, and the sound of a bell much different than the one on the mirror could be heard. He found himself beginning to be dragged into the mirror, not fully aware enough of what was happening to pull away. Not until, somewhere in the background, he could hear Arthur coming through the front door.

"Alfred! Alfred where are you! I have a treat for you!" footsteps could be heard, and then cursing as the other most likely found the basement door open. "Damn you boy!"

Alfred panicked, not wanting to get in trouble being caught with the weird freaky mirror, and pulled his hand violently away. Confused, he found that when he pulled his hand out of the watery substance that had been glass, there was another hand gripping to his. Alfred began flipping out more and dropped the mirror, jerking back. With that final movement backward, the small boy that looked so much like him was standing next to him, seeming to have been pulled out of the mirror.

When Arthur had found the basement door open, he wondered how the hell he could have trusted the young boy home alone. He began to run down the stairs, and grew pale at what he saw. Alfred was holding Alice's Looking Glass. He began to run forward, wanting to pull his treasured brother away before he lost him to the looking glass world like another had before him, but then something astounding happened. Something that wasn't supposed to be able to...

Alfred pulled his reflection out of the glass.

Standing there in awe, England looked at the two. " A-alfred…" Arthur was pale. He had been studying that glass for years, trying to figure out how it worked, and then Alfred did the impossible, bringing the rusty mirror to life. Walking over slowly, he picked up the poorly shined looking mirror, looking at it with distaste. He supposed it was too late for the spell now. Walking passed the two boys he threw the still activated mirror into a drawer, locking it tightly. Looking back, he was finally ready to face the facts.

He now had Alfred, and his now crying, babbeling, persona to take care of.

He sat down, pale, trying to figure out what to do.


End file.
